Public Service - day of strike

[Complainer]

The unions would have been completely embedded in these discussions on how to treat employees who wanted to take a holiday day and leave the militants to themselves. This is most certainly a union agreed and quite likely driven policy.

Can I just clarify - Is this speculation or do you have some knowledge of what actually happened?

 

[Purple]

Which is why Private Sector workers are queueing up to pay more tax, hand over child benefit, insist on paying university fees for their kids and so on. Public Servants are striking over unfair, across the board cuts, and at being specifically targetted. And also to make it clear that the Government cannot keep coming back to Public Servants in every single budget between now and God knows when as a handy lucky dip every time they need to save money.

Public sector employees benefitted most from the boom. It is only fair that they pay their fair share now.

Just a few years ago nurses went on strike for more pay, insisting that a larger proportion of the health budget be given to them rather than spent on beds, A&E etc. Within a few weeks they were back picketing A&E departments because of a lack of resources. What a bunch of hypocrites.
The last OECD report on education shows that Irish teachers are the best paid in the OECD. It also gives strong data linking teachers pay to class sizes. I have given a link to the report in other posts but it should be obvious to anyone with the most basic level of intelligence that the more teachers are paid the fewer the state can afford to pay and the larger classes are. More hypocrisy from people who claim to have the interests of children at heart but will happily hang them out to dry for more money.

 

[liaconn]

Public sector employees benefitted most from the boom. It is only fair that they pay their fair share now.

quote]

Oh really? All those builders, property developers, people charging through the nose for doing work on your house, private sector workers showing off in front of, and laughing at ,public servants and wondering why on earth we were willing to work for such crap salaries when they were minting it, weren't benefitting from the boom? Some of the strides Public Servants made were due to the fact that their salaries were absolutely abysmal to start with. Also, there's a difference between people paying their fair share and being scapegoated and having across the board cuts imposed on them regardless of grade or area of the public service they work in. You have said, yourself, on other threads that it's not necessarily fair.

 

[Purple]

Oh really?

Yes, really. Pay in the public sector was higher than pay in the private sector 10 years ago. In the intervening ten years that gap has increased.

You have said, yourself, on other threads that it's not necessarily fair.

Across the board cuts are never fair to all involved but we simply don’t have the time to engage in structured reform of the public sector. It would be great if we did but we don’t since the public sector unions will continue to block any and all attempts at meaningful reform.
I have a lot of sympathy for public sector employees at the moment; they took their jobs based on certain expectations and now the goal-posts are being moved. I also think the pension levy is a pay cut in all but name and is unfair; a simple pay cut would have been better and would have saved more money since pensions would have been cut as well.

The bottom line is that the pay increases enjoyed by the public sector over the last few years were funded by taxes raised on an unsustainable capital boom, funded by cheap credit. The boom is bust and the money isn’t there anymore. In that context fairness plays second fiddle to harsh economic realities.